Will Smith recently was interviewed by Trevor Noah on “The Daily Show,” where he broke down his new movie “Emancipation,” and he discussed the now iconic onstage moment at the 94th Academy Awards.
Smith has started the promotional rollout for Antoine Fuqua’s “Emancipation,” in which he portrays a enslaved person escaping captivity. The role is expected to receive similar praise, or more that he got from “King Richard.” The actor won a Best Actor prize at the Academy Awards in late March. This was the night Smith slapped comedian Chris Rock on stage on live television after Rock made a joke about Smith’s wife, Jada Pinkett-Smith.
Smith received major backlash from fans and Hollywood at large, which took away his Academy membership and released an official apology. However, compared to years past, he has maintained an extremely low profile since the incident.
Explaining the encounter on March 27 — which Noah called “one of the best” and “worst” days of Smith’s life — the star said, “That was a horrific night, as you can imagine. There’s many nuances and complexities to it, but at the end of the day I just … I lost it.”
Smith explained that you “never know what someone is going through” in life.
“I was going through something that night,” he went on to say. “Not that that justifies my behavior at all; you’re asking, ‘What did I learn,’ and it’s that we just gotta be nice to each other, man.”
“I guess the thing that was most painful for me,” Smith added, “is I took my heart and made it hard for other people. I understood the idea when they say hurt people hurt people.”
The actor shared that his 9-year-old nephew, who watched the Oscars that night, later asked him why he “hit that man.”
“I was like, it was a mess,” Smith told Noah. “I don’t want to go too far into it to give people more to misunderstand.”
